Hmmm, every server I'm getting spam from has a new user in their public directory named yqqwe, and each one of these users is following mastodon_admin_yggwe on a single-user instance mastodon.tinynews.org. One can look at the 924 followers of this admin and they all are named yqqwe and they are all on servers I've been getting #spam from. #fediverse#moderation#administration
Having read up on the #Meta drama that occurred yesterday:
No, we won't block Meta before anything happens.
Yes, we will hold them to the same standards as everyone else. This means blocks, only when there's reason to do so.
Some #MastoAdmin's need to quit this weird power trip. The software has great personal moderation tools for fine-grained control. Don't make decisions for hundreds or thousands of people just because you don't like something.
This is kinda cursed and I feel kinda bad about this, but I just re-created Twitter UI to #Mastodon with #CSS only... wanted to see how quickly it's possible to do.
Now that I have everything in CSS vars (shame that Mastodon has them hardcoded at the moment), I can use this as base to create another theme for myself. #MastoAdmin#WebDev#Twitter
Edit: Fixed things to the screenshot as I'm kind of a perfectionist/OCD-person.
A: You can limit who can send you DMs/PMs! You can also limit notifications!
B: You can also block a site entirely for yourself.
See attached pics for how.
2: Instance administrators:
If you don't want to block threads.net entirely, consider these options for your userbase's safety:
A: Between "Full federation" and "Suspend" there is LIMIT, which hides content from an instance unless a user either follows the user posting it, or searches for it.
B: There is also "Reject media," which means you never cache a remote site's attachments. This de facto makes all such content sensitive ("unavailable"), requiring an additional click to view.
While we are doing our best to quickly respond to #spam complaints in the past few days, we encourage you to consider (at least temporarily) turning on one or more of the "Other Notifications Settings" listed at the bottom of https://floss.social/settings/preferences/notifications (you may need to adjust the URL for your own server's domain name).
At minimum, consider the first checkbox "Block notifications from non-followers".
We have a final design for our metalhead.club Billboard in Wacken (village of Wacken Open Air!)
A big "Thank you! 🙏 " goes out to @bestiaexmachina for her work on the design! ... and also thanks to all the members who contributed their ideas and thoughts - I named them all in the updated blog post:
We are removing all the Crypto Spam coming from the fake accounts on mastodon.social just as fast as we get the reports. It seems to have started about 13 hours ago.
If it gets to bad we will TEMPORARILY limit mastodon.social so only followers of accounts can see their posts and the rest of us won't see the spam. Then as m.s gets it under control we would unsuspend them.
Heya #MastoAdmin peeps, if you use S3 storage today, I highly recommend you check out the alternatives. For example, #FRZ uses DigitalOcean's Spaces S3-compatible storage at a fraction of the price. My storage bill in October was $25. The same storage and transfer in S3 would've been $158.
phpc.social is now on Mastodon v4.2.1 (skipped directly from 4.1.10 past 4.2.0). ElasticSearch re-indexing will take a bit, but all of the other pieces are in place. Thanks to everyone's patience on this upgrade, which...seems to have worked out fine this time.
Has anyone built Fediverse stats that show amount of people who post in certain language or top posters in the whole Fediverse? I'd be curious to see how many Finnish people there are among all instances.
It’s been exactly one year since I joined to the Fediverse. Let me tell you my Fediverse story. It does not fit in 500 characters, but glad I have 10000 here.
It first started with Musk tweeting about the sink. I had already given up on Twitter couple of years prior this, but that was the final straw. I saw people talking about Mastodon and I was skeptical. First I looked at mastodon.social, but quickly noticed the username rolle is taken. "That’s it, then", I angrily tweeted that I do not want to join with another nickname, I’m rolle eveywhere AND THE NICK IS TAKEN. Someone immediately pointed out that I should join another instance. An instance, what's that, huh? I then joined to a Finnish instance mastodontti.fi and quickly learned no English is allowed. A moderator pointed out that I should remove my post. Again, I angrily tweeted THAT'S IT THEN, MASTODON SUCKS, STUPID RULES. Another user politely explained that each instance has their own rules, why don't you create another account. An instance, huh?
I quickly learned about the nature of the service. I vaguely remember favoriting tootsuite/mastodon back in 2017 and thought it was just a forum-kinda software back then, for one small community. I consider myself quite witty but I didn't realize Mastodon servers are interconnected. So I joined mstdn.social. And how fun was that! I was elated! My head exploded when I realized how active it was and how amazing the community is.
But then the sudden influx of users made mstdn.social slow and unresponsive. I was thinking about building my own instance, after all I'm a server guy. During 5th of November, 2022, I got my instance up and running, #MementoMoriSocial was born: https://mementomori.social/@rolle/109293139965069879
I wanted my instance to be well federated and active from the start. I followed everyone, I still do. I use a dozen active relays. I managed to finance the instance through my company and get a bit more powerful hardware than necessary. I was alone on my instance first, then invited my wife, colleague and my company.
What I liked in the Fediverse is that I can build my own tools, I own my data and I can help making things better. I have contributed to things via form of:
and some other things that have been affecting in the general development of Mastodon.
I'm very pleased I can have fun and make my own things while other people like it as well. I first thought all this would be a huge cause of mental stress but it's been on the contrary.
After a couple of months of successful running I opened my instance to the world. Now there's about 150 active users from companies to regular folk and everything has been running smoothly. I have been able to moderate because I require a reason for joining to my instance, so I really do know who the people are. I also welcome each user personally. I know my shit thoroughly and completely. This is why it has been easy to moderate. I've been able to be mostly absent during regular week days from 8am to 6pm, but still be aware of what's happening via effective monitoring, good apps and infrastructure.
For me the key thing is to optimize everything to the tooth. I also regulate my own social media usage, because I get too easily hooked. Mastodon and all its tools have taken an enormous amount of time, but it's been really fun, didn't even notice a full year has passed.
As for the Finnish community, there were thousands of active users, I kept a list. However, for some reason lately the narrative everywhere about Mastodon is that it is difficult and it has no future and people have mostly left to Bluesky. I kinda get that, because even for me starting last year was messy. But things get better, I wish more people would see that.
Mastodon is special. The Fediverse is special. Here's to another year! 🎉 :neon_skull:
Mastodon favorite star ⭐ interaction is changing to the heart ❤️ in the upcoming Mastodon version.
With Mastodon Bird UI I have already built it with heart interaction support à la the birdie site in the past despite it having the star as default and I'm most often than not going to follow the official Mastodon direction. But I still want to ask, what do you think?
If you depend on our #relay my dear #mastoadmin folks, and have a GitHub account, chiming in on how this will impact you would be appreciated. If you’re unsure how it will impact you, I’ll sum it up: no more relay 😣 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/23989
can everybody please do me the hardest of solids and #boost this post so that this #firefish#instance gets #federation easier? i'm just testing stuff out on my local server uwu
For Sharkey/Misskey users, update to the latest dev for the email domain block feature. Then copy and paste the temporary/disposable email domain list to Blocked Email Domains in Security under Control Panel.
Liebe Menschen auf chaos.social, eine kleine Info wegen der noch immer anhaltenden Spam Well. Leider können wir nicht viel machen, da Mastodon aktuell keine Features zur Spambekämpfung hat. Das frustriert uns auch. Leider scheint jede Instanz auch nur ein mal genutzt zu werden, sprich Limits oder Blocks ganzer Instanzen helfen nicht. Was wir aber sehen ist das Accounts die Follower Only und höchstwahrscheinlich auch Unlisted posten nicht betroffen zu sein scheinen. #mastoadmin
⚠️ After some more investigation it looks like every (mostly) public toot without a mention triggers a spam mention. Posting "unlisted" or "follower only" should help to reduce the spam you get. #mastoadmin